The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Installed. Seems to be running the currently installed games at a relatively similar performance as 365.19, although Internet Explorer makes the driver crash if I load a YouTube video and close the window while the video is running. Strange.
Drivers seem to work fine in games, but I noticed a bug where if I power off my external monitor then turn it back on, the screen will flash, it brings up a notification about a G-Sync display being connected (my monitor is compatible), and the mouse cursor vanishes. It comes back if I right click on the desktop and select something, but I've never had this issue with previous drivers. I can't reproduce the issue consistently either. I can't roll back either because Mirror's Edge Catalyst won't run at all on earlier drivers.
Sounds like a reason to not get MEC. As if the problem where it is the machine sees four hardware changes as four new PCs and throws up the activation limit wasn't enough reason.
So what is the consensus of driver 368.39? Stable? Is it okay for my laptop and desktop that have Maxwell? Or should I stick with 362.00 because NVIDIA are still clowns who don't know their heads from their asses?
I'm waiting for someone here on the forums to start their gpu company and show nvidia how it's done. I mean so many seem to know how incompetent they are and how it's done.
Because they're a self-fulfilling prophecy in company form.
People know nVidia. Word on the street (which as we know never gets updated) is that nVidia = good, AMD = bad. Nobody reports on nVidia's screw ups, and everybody still says all drivers are perfect and cause no problems except for that one driver that got pulled (which STILL nobody even said a single thing about how it passed WHQL certification). Etc etc.
Computer shops sell nVidia only, or sell AMD cards at a huge price markup and/or don't include the cards that compete best. For example: I had a request a few months ago to find a pre-building website to make a few PCs for a startup game dev company. I searched as many people as I could find, and nobody... NOBODY... offered the R9 Fury card. At ALL. The $550 USD card that was 20% faster than the 980 was nowhere to be found. But the Fury X card was... at $100 more than a 980Ti. I don't know where they found $550 980Ti cards, or perhaps $750 Fury X cards, or EVEN $600 980Ti + $700 Fury X cards... but there was a $100 price difference. And the same happened for other cards. R9 390X costed as much as a 980, and they wouldn't even give the brand of the card. It was crap.
nVidia is a household name associated with the best hardware and the best technology and the best drivers. The hardware is now unstable (voltage variance; all Maxwell and Pascal cards), unbalanced (GTX 960, 965M, Titan X), broken (970), overpriced (980, Titan X, 1080) and is designed to NOT be good in multi-GPU configs. The drivers are by and large garbage, excepting a few generally-accepted "good" drivers over the last year and a half. Every tech they produce is proprietary and costs extra money for no reason other than they want more money, and even if they have fixes for problems afflicting their cards (like SLI requiring more bandwidth between the cards), if they can't monetize a solution (like NVLink) they simply refuse to fix it (refusal to use XDMA-like configurations) and consumers just have to salt.
But nobody reports these things. Nobody speaks out about it. Nobody anything. So the general public, both those who are ignorant and those who know but don't care because "it doesn't bother me", and the pathetic buyer's remorse avoiders who will defend anything broken so that they feel like they didn't buy crap so they could sleep better at night? They fuel more and more and more marketshare for them.
I'm not saying AMD is a saint. I'm not saying they have the best hardware for the purpose of gaming. I'm not saying everybody should buy them for every purpose. But what I *AM* saying is that the reason nV has such huge marketshare levels is because everybody just keeps fueling it over and over. And you can't say anything bad about them, because people jump up and get mad and a large enough group of salty people has a louder voice than some random user on the internet claiming that people need to stop giving power to corporation X. It doesn't matter how many facts you bring to light. It doesn't matter how sound your logic is. People will simply deny it and enough people denying something ends up making others feel that they're true. Simple.
If I were to sit you down and spend an hour or two explaining all the crap they've done in the last three years ALONE to consumers and what we know they're planning to do in the future, you'd probably walk away wondering why people love them yourself. Their honest saving grace right now is that their hardware is stronger. If the RX 480 was 1070 level and cost $240 for the 8GB version, nobody would buy a 1070. There'd be no reason. But it isn't, it's a decent amount weaker, so now the price difference (even if over $100 USD) makes sense. This is why everyone is more frustrated with AMD than anything else right now.
Honestly, I feel the same way about Rogers Cable that I do about Nvidia... I don't
hate them, because they can provide a good product/service when they are actually bothered to do so and they do provide some good products/services. However, I hate that they are anti-competition and then become lazy because of this and then consumers have to suffer with stagnation or worse.
I don't know about the sarcasm, really. There's a lot of people who have come to that conclusion in the past too. "People DO still buy them regularly so they can't be that bad, right?" is common.
But yes... I have problems with any company that don't actually bother trying to improve themselves unless they NEED to to win back marketshare.
I know this is slightly off-topic but I think some great examples of companies that don't need to improve themselves but do so anyways are Noctua and Sennheiser. Both have absolutely top of the line, premium products and always come out with better and better products even though they really don't have to. I wish Nvidia and Intel could be more like that.
So you're saying the 1080 and 1070 aren't better than the 980 and 970? Is a 2016 car that much better than the 2015 model of the same model? Is it did make strides did they do it year in and year out.
The best they can do is continue to iteratively improve and make shareholders happy at the same time with how much profit they are making. Maybe people should stop buying their products if they feel that way?
You can't know how much better the 1080 and 1070 would have been than they currently are if AMD was providing real competition to NVIDIA. NVIDIA is a shady company at best that makes some good products.
Sometimes, the page closes while I am editing or starting to edit, and the post has been made. It's frustrating, but there it is.
And, it takes along with it any buffer of edits that is left in the cache - at times multiple responses and partial committed edits abandoned and not submitted.
All you can do is either edit back into the response you intended to start, or make a "please delete me" post.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
jaybee83 and Spartan@HIDevolution like this.
Yeah..., Pascal on the way!!
